48: Art Deco and a Lived-In World
Do you want to know how you don’t make a period piece? This is how you don’t make a period piece:
This is a still from Ryan Murphy’s 2020 Netflix miniseries Hollywood. The series is set in the late 1940s. On some level, even if you’ve never seen a frame of Hollywood you get that it’s set in the late 1940s. The gentleman in center frame’s high waisted pants, short tie, and embroidered name tag (and the fact that he’s smoking at the pump) scream mid-century Americana just as hard as the gas pumps do. If you didn’t get it from that, the setting would have been driven home with the pristine 1947 Chevrolet Fleetline that’s about to drive up to that gas station. The thing is, that’s not what a 1940s gas station looks like. This is what a 1940s gas station looks like:
Murphy’s gas station has state of the art new “computing” pumps that automatically calculate the price as the gas is dispensed, introduced in the late 1930s. The photo of the actual gas station (a photo by photographer Dorothea Lange titled “Riverbank Gas Station”) has one of these computing pumps, but it also has one earlier “visible” style pump, introduced in the 1920s, where the attendant noted the amount of gasoline in the top visible chamber of the pump at the beginning and end of the transaction and charged accordingly. The attendant is not in a neatly pressed shirt and tie, he’s in overalls. More than anything else though, he’s not putting gas in a car that rolled off the assembly line moments ago, he’s putting gas in a 1932 Ford Coupe. For Murphy, the way to make his miniseries feel like 1947 is to make sure that everything in it is the sparkling and beautiful and new version of the thing from 1947, but not everything in the real 1947 was less than a year old. As I write this essay in 2020, I’m doing so on a computer from 2014, sitting in a chair from 2012 next to a couch from 2008. Across the room is my stereo receiver from 2018 hooked up to my turntable from 1990. Nothing in the room was designed or marketed as new in 2020, so if a future Ryan Murphy wanted to make a period piece about 2020 and set it in a living room, it would not look like mine. The Hudsucker Proxy is set in 1958, however the only brand-new-in-1958 item that appears in it is the Hula Hoop. The art, style and decoration of the film are primarily from the 1930s, but that doesn’t make it feel like the film is from the 1930s. It simply makes it feel more realistically like the 1950s.
Of the 18 films they have directed to date, only 5 of the Coens films are not period pieces*. While it’s become a signature of theirs to set a film in a very specific time to evoke a very specific mood, when Hudsucker was made, it was still a process they were feeling out. The entire reason Hudsucker was filmed in 1992 rather than 1985 immediately after it was written was that they felt they couldn’t secure the funding to make the movie they wanted to make due to its setting. The unnamed city of Miller’s Crossing remains unnamed no doubt in part so that the film could be set in the 1920s without any pressure to recreate the specific 1920s of a specific American city. Setting Barton Fink in 1941 in Los Angeles required some legwork to find a period appropriate location for the hellish Hotel Earle, but beyond that required nothing more than some period-appropriate costumes to be shot against orange groves and beaches.
Hudsucker needed more, however. It is set in the most populous and dense city in the United States. New York City cannot be faked with an orange grove and a vintage suit. Making New York City work requires resources, hence waiting until Joel Silver and his money can be used to make the movie. The tricky part is that while it’s set in the late 1950s, Hudsucker is also a pastiche of screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s. To make Hudsucker work, it needs to look like all three decades at once. Joel Silver’s money can only go so far though, and to make this stylistic need work, the Coens made a brilliant decision to set the film primarily in Midtown Manhattan.
As the city of New York grew in the early 20th century, a great deal of its economic growth went from blue collar to white collar jobs. Advances in telecommunication first via the telegraph and then the telephone meant that the act of building things could happen in one place while all the paper pushed behind it could happen somewhere else. This, coupled with advances in structural engineering, the rediscovery of reinforced concrete as a building material, and a startling amount of granite quarried from northern New England brought about the advent of the skyscraper. Skyscrapers both allow for large numbers of workers to be clustered in one space and allowed for the captains of industry behind those corporations to create giant monuments to their greatness. A great irony of this first wave of skyscrapers is that the money was made to create them through the roaring 1920s, but because of how long it took to plot out their construction many of the most iconic of the first big wave of skyscrapers were finally built years later in the heights of the Great Depression. Owing to their nature as centers of commerce, the most iconic buildings of this period came up in Manhattan’s center of commerce, the district north of 14th St and south of 59th St: Midtown. Owing to the time in which they were built, these iconic buildings all share an architectural style: art deco. Iconic Midtown New York art deco skyscrapers include The Empire State Building (33rd & 5th, 102 floors, constructed 1930-1931), The Chrysler Building (42nd and Lexington, 77 floors, constructed 1930), Rockefeller Center (49th and 5th, 70 floors, constructed 1930), The New Yorker (34th and 8th, 43 floors, constructed 1930) and the Hudsucker Building (40th and Madison, 44 floors —45 counting the mezzanine—, constructed 193X).
Art Deco as a style grew out of the artistic movements of the beginning of the 20th century such as the striking lines of Cubism and the bold colors of Fauvism. As an artistic style it’s defined by its thick and sharply drawn lines, often a combination of straight lines and lines with a very regular curve. Everything about it suggests a kind of beautiful machine-made quality, with steadier forms than could be created by the human hand alone. Art Deco’s beginnings in the 1910s and 1920s had more to do with the design of consumer goods and advertisements than fine art, but they remain striking. I’m hard pressed to think of another era where original prints of advertisements are collectors items today sold for hundreds of dollars.
Art Deco style began influencing architecture as early as the construction of Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1910, but really picked up steam with the construction of the skyscrapers and great palaces of industry in the late 20s and early 30s. The men who commissioned these buildings wanted them to be things of beauty in addition to functional workplaces. They built the style of the day into their buildings. Art Deco buildings feature both the same sharp gorgeous lines on the buildings’ exteriors and bold expressive colors into their interiors. These bold colors came from using both established material of striking color such as ebony and marble and ivory and newer more modern material of striking color such as stainless steel, chrome plated metal, and early plastics like bakelite and micarta.
The light fittings and built-in furnishings were built to mimic the most in-fashion consumer goods of the era. Many buildings included fine art built into the structure, either in bas relief sculpture or murals (including a famous example of Nelson Rockefeller hiring the communist muralist Diego Rivera to paint a mural in Rockefeller Center’s mezzanine, only to have it destroyed when the artist refused to remove a heroic depiction of Vladimir Lenin).
In so doing, each of these buildings both evoke a very specific moment in time of their original creation and make that design timeless, as the durability and usefulness of the construction made the designs a long lasting fact of everyday life. People still occupy these buildings today. Nobody said of Tina Fey’s iconic turn of the century sitcom 30 Rock that setting it in an Art Deco skyscraper made it look dated despite the building being 83 years old when the show wrapped.
In the meantime, in the 1950s, the landscape of American cities were changing quickly. A combination of the GI Bill’s mortgage assistance for returning WW2 soldiers, increased city-to-city mobility via Ike Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway system, a fear of racial integration after the Supreme Court decision Brown Vs Board of Education was decided, and good old fashioned redlining led to a long period of white flight from the cities starting in the late 1950s. New York was no different. While this led to Amy Archer’s beatnik friends being able to afford apartments in Greenwich Village, it also led to a period of civic economic decay. It meant that in the residential areas of New York began to lose their luster they’d held previously. The Lower East Side of 1930 and the Lower East Side of 1958 were very different places. Midtown though remained a palace of commerce. Business still needed to be done in the Empire State Building, in the Chrysler Building, and in the Hudsucker Building. The same captains of industry now commuting in from New Rochelle, Hempstead, and Hackensack still needed to work in the city and still wanted to work somewhere nice. Midtown, especially inside these nice Art Deco buildings did not seriously change. To this end, in the film we don’t see the Lower East Side. We don’t see the Bowery. We barely even see the Greenwich Village of Anne’s 440. Most of what we see are the interiors of the Hudsucker Building and the offices of the Manhattan Argus, both of which were not shot in Manhattan. Both were constructed in a former airplane hangar in Wilmington, North Carolina. Hudsucker’s sets are giant and cavernous, between the dark and foreboding mailroom , the boardroom with its impossibly long table, the accounting department housing a small army of number crunchers, and Sidney Musburger’s stark and empty giant office, each place is an impossibly big part of an impossibly big building. Even one of the few location shots, in and just outside the lobby of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart building (itself an art deco building from the early 1930s, albeit one with a laughable 25 floors) feels like a giant and luxurious part of a giant and luxurious building. By making the rooms giant and sublime, it implies an even more impressively sized and sublime building for them to be a part of. The Hudsucker Building might be fictitious, but it still positions itself as one of the great skyscrapers of the Midtown Manhattan landscape. The film is set in the 1950s, but by putting it in a building with an established art style from the 1930s, it both pays homage to the 30s and 40s studio comedies that inspired it and makes for a believable lived-in 1950s world where everything isn’t shiny and new. Want to learn how to make a period piece? Don’t turn to Ryan Murphy. Turn to Joel & Ethan Coen.
* This includes Fargo, set in 1987 and released in 1996, and The Big Lebowski, set in 1990 and released in 1998. In Fargo one can see the reason for its period-piece-ness being the narrative need to create some distance between the fictitious “real” crime and the release of the film to underscore its “based on a true story” lie of a title card. In Lebowski the surface-level reason for the setting is purely so that there could be a Saddam Hussein joke and a moment where the audience could point and gawk saying “look at that cell phone! It’s the size of a briefcase! Everyone knows that a cell phone is about the size of a can of coke!” A deeper reason would have to do with the film’s major motif of the legacy of the cultural movements of the legacy of the late 1960s which was very much in the public’s consciousness in the early 1990s but that’s another essay.